Getting Even

Revenge... is forgiveness's other face. It is an emotion, discounting mercy, neat to the taste and born of a desperate need to rectify a wrong by inflicting harm in return for an injury, a slight, or an insult and to exact satisfaction for that which, at least in the sufferer's eye, blind and stupid fate (never, of course, without its specific agent) not only has allowed but in a way has cruelly fostered. The sole desire in retribution is to equalize: "I'll get even with you!" To revenge is, in fact, to avenge. Simply put, it seeks-it demands-justice...

Revenge transfigures you. It boils and concocts into poisonous nourishment all the facts and fictions it compounds from the lives of its enemies, and fuels the delight it abhors, for your grief has found the one thing in this life that causes it. Alive, it is your plague, instigates against you, throttles all you are. The vigorous if irrational idea is that you alone of all others on earth are left to correct what otherwise must go forever uncorrected. And in spite of the fact that in the process you become a cauldron of pure pain-owned, in fact, by that which you would sell,, and are diminished by ("The murderer," writes Nabokov, "is always the victim's inferior") -there is often a crazy comfort in the obsession with whatever must be vindicated by whomever must be abused or punished or killed...

REVENGE! Where hasn't this shadow reached? It is a poem by Tennyson, the name of Sir Richard Grenville's famous ship, and a tragedy by Edward Young. There is an Iranian drink so named. Fairy tales have virtually have no other plot. It is as old as the first murder ("And Cain was very wroth and his countenance fell") and as recent as the summer of 1982, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon and announced that this was in retaliation for the shooting of a diplomat in London. It is the central theme of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, animates every discussion of capital punishment, and is even implied in the Virginia state motto: Sic semper tyrannis-Booth, avenging the lost Civil War, shot Lincoln howling those very words. I'd suggest that along with love and war, with which themes, let us say, it has more than passing acquaintance, revenge is the single most informing element of great world literature. And George Orwell, in his essay "Why I Write" (1947), cites it as the first motive for many taking up the profession ("the desire ... to get your own back on grownups who snubbed you in childhood, etc."). The revengeful personality-it is more often than not an intel1ectual's, of which Hamlet, a thinker, not a "rash and splenetic" type, is only one example-very often has the power, in fact, to give a significant penetrating quality to literary expression; one thinks of Juvenal on Roman decadence, Luther on papistical excesses, Milton on Charles I, and Hitler on the Treaty of Versailles.

--Alexander Theroux, "Revenge", Harper's, October 1982

The last day of September marks the conclusion of Turner Classic Movies' month-long festival of revenge pictures. If I were to be absolutely honest about it, I guess I'd say that revenge is probably my favorite motive: in movies, in books, and for getting up in the morning. For fantasy identification figures, you can scarcely beat it. I have enjoyed stories in which the hero is driven by the need to win the heart of the woman he loves or achieve recognition for his talents and accomplishments, but for most of my life, the enjoyment has been tinged with wistfulness, because the goals seem so unrealistic by the standards of my own life. Maybe I'm heading towards a big finish, but all in all, receiving love, instead of awkward silences or being made the subject of stalking rumors, in exchange for extending love, or receiving riches and adulation instead of blank stares and pink slips for my hard work and brilliant ideas: these things have mostly been unknown to me. Not completely unknown, but they probably don't make up more than one percent of the full term of my earthly existence thus far. But I have had some modest success at hurting and irritating people who have hurt or irritated me. Nothing flashy, I suppose, but the satisfaction is undeniable, and success at it in the past has led me to dare to dream that I might be able to keep doing it, just as past failures at love and material success have drilled into me a sense that I was simply doomed in those areas. I am not kidding when I say that there have been times in my life when the only thing that kept me from suicide was the certain knowledge that, were I to die, there would be people left behind who I would never hurt the way I wanted to hurt them. Even today, with my fortunes in the love department much improved and my material fortunes--well, I'm not homeless, okay?--even now, there are hollowed-out spaces in my life, patches that have turned black and gone numb and will never spark to life again, because there are people who I always wanted to hurt who went and died on me before I could do something to them that would grind them into the dirt like a burnt out cigarette. Aunt Betty, wherever you are, I'm looking at you.

I insist on a distinction between revenge movies and vigilante movies, the latter of which took over the action genre when I was a kid, and which are the bane of contemporary pop culture. The real difference is a degree of self-righteousness that infuses the view of the vigilante, the man who is not just fearlessly tough but so omniscient that he can serve as judge, jury, and executioner, without any worries that he will ever kill the wrong person or somehow do more harm than good. The model of the vigilante hero is Dirty Harry, who has a badge but isn't beholden to the laws of man, making him both a sanctified authority figure and a dashing rebel. He is, at his core, self-pitying, a wuss. He won't play by the rules, but he won't accept being classified as an outlaw, either. The true revenge hero will accept your respect, but he doesn't expect society to sanction his acts and he doesn't expect the law to let him off the hook. The important thing is payback, and he's willing to go down with his target if he has to, as readily as Ahab went down with Moby Dick.

The greatest revengers, from Hamlet to the members of Peckinpah's Wild Bunch, extending their punishment of the man who killed their friend in front of them to a declaration of war, have been self-immolating. The revenger wants to be successful and to have satisfaction, but if he has any intelligence, he must suspect that he also has no right to survive his revenge. Hamlet may want to avenge his father and Pike and the boys may want to avenge Angel, but they are also meting out punishment that is necessarily overscaled for a slight against himself. Because at the core of every revenger--we know this, because as the audience experiencing the story and identifying with the hero--is the fiery, driving feeling, I can't believe that you had the nerve to do something that you must have known would make me this mad! Your assumption that you would not pay terribly for having pissed me off is an insult that cannot go unanswered!



There is a sadness at the revenger's core that is apparent in the first movie TCM showed as part of its festival, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. This is one of the total of two movies I know of starring Charles Bronson that haunt the memory, because he is driven by revenge untainted by vigilantism. (The other is Walter Hill's Depression movie Hard Times, in which he is so ennobled by hardship that he is beyond both these things, leaving human failings to his enemies and business associates.) Bronson wears a sad smile here rather than cloaking himself in self-pitying anger, and it makes an enormous difference. In the movie's Marxist-counterculture framework, he is, by helping Claudia Cardinale build her train station in defiance of the capitalist villains and their attack dog, Frank (Henry Fonda), he is participating in making himself an anachronism; when civilization comes to the West, there will be no room for mysterious, nameless drifters willing to burn the world down, if that's what it takes to avenge an ancient slight that even his enemy has forgotten. This is a classic Western trope, but the ending of Once Upon a Time in the West is dry-eyed compared to the soppy finish of Shane, in which the saintly gunslinger wipes out the bad guys so the good guys can thrive and then rides offscreen to die. Bronson isn't dying when he rides off, but he might as well just fade away. He's done what he had to do; there's no indication what he might have left in his life, with his enemy vanquished, or that, like Shane, he might have fallen in love and had a family if his life had taken a different turn. Bronson lived another 35 years after making the movie. The thought of what Harmonica might have done with another 35 years without his white whale dead is kind of frightening.

Once Upon a Time in the West was the first Western that Leone made without Clint Eastwood, whom he'd made a star with the "Dollars" trilogy. Eastwood, who would do as much as anyone besides Bronson to make self-righteous vigilante figures the dominant type in action movie heroes, directed and starred in High Plains Drifter (1973), which went about as far as any Hollywood movie made in the early '70s in trying to make an American Italian Western. There's some El Topo in there, too, and while most of the movie is set in a little town where Eastwood's mysterious nameless drifter has agreed to help the weak, cowardly locals protect themselves from some vengeful killers on their way home, there are also moments when Eastwood cuts to the killers, who seem to have blundered into a Monte Hellman movie. As its list of influences implies, High Plains Drifter is designed to be quite a head trip: the drifter is actually the ghost of the town's previous sheriff, who, in a series of flashbacks that make him out to be the Kitty Genovese of the Old West, was horsewhipped to death by the bad guys while the whole town stood by and did nothing; they wanted him dead because he was about to blow the whistle on some skulduggery perpetrated by the town's main employer. They then set the killers up and railroaded them for robbery, so the bad guys actually have solid grounds for wanting revenge on the townspeople. But because the drifter is played by the star of the movie, his claim to revenge on both the killers and the townspeople trumps everything else. (Twelve years later, Eastwood directed and starred in Pale Rider, which revived this mash-up of action Western, and ghost story and fused it to a rip-off of Shane for good measure.)



HIgh Plains Drifter mostly serves to illustrate why Leone was wise to see that Eastwood wouldn't fit into the world he began to explore onscreen after The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the last film of the "Dollars" trilogy. For all the weirdness, the movie never manages to budge above the level of a juvenile fantasy about the being the baddest motherfucker around. The drifter not only has both the moral authority and superior skills to kill anyone he likes without any fear of the consequences, he has a license to rape, which he seems to avail himself of in order to punish women for having grossed him out by desiring him. Eastwood was better suited to playing vigilantes than revengers--no compliment, just a sad truth. His lack of perspective and reflectiveness, a useful quality in the shaping of flawless adolescent identification figures but a problem if you hope to reach for anything more, defeats him here, as it would in the next Western he directed, the 1976 The Outlaw Josey Wales, in which he played a Missouri farmer whose family is senselessly butchered by pro-Union meanies; he takes up arms to avenge them, then, after the war, spends the rest of the movie killing people who keep showing up trying to start some shit with him, after he's survived, and partially avenged, a massacre of his unarmed comrades by evil Yankees after the Rebs have surrendered. The movie, which is included in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, has become a key text among those who sentimentalize the Antebellum South, who may or may not be embarrassed by the fact that it's based on a novel by "Forrest Carter", i.e., Asa Carter, a hardcore white racist who founded his own fringe Ku Klux Klan group and worked as a speechwriter for George Wallace in his "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" period. (Under the "Forrest Carter" pseudonym, he also wrote The Education of Little Tree, which, after his death, became something of a cult classic in New Age and granola circles. This could probably be seen as either his revenge on liberals or their unconscious revenge on him, but I'm not sure which.)



Comparing Leone's work with Bronson versus Eastwood's with Eastwood, one might conclude that non-American directors are more likely to keep their heads while remaking our genre cliches into something wild and new. Two of the flashiest and most febrile films TCM has shown were the work of cerebral, eccentric British directors: John Boorman, who was good enough to bequeath to us his vision of Los Angeles circa 1967 with Point Blank, and Mike Hodges, who kept things closer to home with his 1971 Newcastle noir Get Carter. Point Blank was based on The Hunter, the first in the series of books that Donald Westlake, writing under the name "Richard Stark", hammered together about the professional sociopath Parker. He was rechristened "Walker" in the movie, which might be his name or might be the generic label under which he's be filed at the supermarket; Lee Marvin's main function in the role is to walk, walk, walk to the next set at which he will administer his next ass-whupping as he climbs the corporate climb ladder, trying to reclaim the $93,000 he earned when he and his pal Reece (John Vernon, in his first big movie role in what would be a long, completely untrustworthy career) intercepted "the Alcatraz run." When Reece took the money, he also shot Walker, left him for dead, and made off with his wife. Part of the movie's outrageous fascination is that Walker dispatches Reece fairly early on, by which time he's visited his wife, who promptly reacts to the news of his continued existence by committing suicide. You might think that this would be the logical climax to his lust for revenge, and maybe it is, because he never seems particularly lustful or much of anything else as he continues to run amok, tearing down the whole organization as he chases after his $93,000. Maybe this is what Harmonica, in Once Upon a Time in the West, became after he'd finished off Frank: an empty vessel, still super competent and totally ruthless, denuded of all passion but still hard at work. Just because you've lost your reason for living doesn't mean you tolerate unfinished business.



The Parker books are so stripped for action that it didn't take much of a shove to turn the material into an abstract fantasy on the theme of violent revenge. Get Carter is more straightforward but has a similar merciless flavor. There is no pretense that any of the characters are likable, let alone socially tolerable. Michael Caine's Jack Carter is a professional killer who got out of the urban slum and moved to London, where he works for the big Mr. Big. The playwright John Osborne plays the Newcastle heavy, the small town Mr. Big. Carter has returned home because someone had the temerity to murder his brother, who he himself most likely cuckolded; there is a strong suggestion that Jack is the father of his brother's daughter. Everyone, including the people who have the most reason to fear Jack--Ian Hendry, the Osborne employee who had something to do with the murder, and Osborne himself, whose organization Jack has no compunctions about interfering with if that's what it takes for him to get what he's after--goes out of his way to treat Jack insolently and rudely, and to express disdain for his mission. Since they can't possibly doubt his ability to kill them, they must doubt his willingness to die himself if he has to in order to kill them, which is a bad call on their part. The movie ends with Osborne helping to set up Hendry so that Carter will leave his business alone. Then Hendry arranges for a sniper to be in place to take Carter out--though not before Carter has been allowed to take out Hendry. But by that time, Carter has guaranteed that, while he's finishing off Hendry, Osborne will be brought down, either as revenge for the double cross he knows is coming or just because he's so far past giving a damn. Get Carter is much loved by the English, who treasure it as evidence that they can make grim, mean action movies just like Hollywood. Of course, they can't make them just like Hollywood--an American remake of Get Carter made in 2000, with Sylvester Stallone in the title role, was apparently made for the express purpose of proving this--which is why all the rest of us treasure it. (The recent British movie Harry Brown, which stars Caine as an old man wiping out the scum who've infested the area surrounding the housing project where he lives, tries to tap into fond memories of Get Carter, but it is instead a ham-handed example of the vigilante genre, a sort of generic Death Wish--which, come to think of it, is what Death Wish installments 2 through 4 were, the last one having been made when Charles Bronson was in his seventies.)



There are more elegant ways of going about these things. The classic 1934 version of The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Robert Donat, The Dumas story is a full-blooded, baroque masterpiece of the art of the paranoid fantasy: the hero, Edmond Dantès, is packed off to a prison cell by villains to whom he has done no wrong, simply because circumstances have made his presence politically inconvenient. It's only slightly personal in the case of one of these sacks of shit, because he loves Dantès's fiancee. When, having long since been thought dead, he returns, with a new name and personal fortune, he goes above methodically springing a series of traps that bring his enemies low, though a big part of his triumph is simply that, reincarnated as the dashing Count of Monte Cristo, he has gone from being a harmless but likable fellow to a tortured, iconic romantic hero, and clearly their superior in terms of personal style. The fact that the woman he loves is now married to one of the men he will destroy, and that the image of the enemy's younger self lives on in the form of their son, who Dantès recognizes as a fine young man in need of a worthy father figure, adds a tinge of the kind of revenge fantasy I have always found most potent, that of the frustrated lover.



Tonight's TCM schedule is divided into two categories, one of which is "A Spurned Lover's Revenge", represented by two classic lit adaptations directed by William Wyler: Wuthering Heights and The Heiress. The other category is "A Con Artist's Revenge". Actually, the greatest movie on tonight, Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve, straddles these two categories. Like Sturges's other masterpiece, Unfaithfully Yours, it plays havoc with settled assumptions about love and faithfulness. Con artist Barbara Stanwyck sets her sights on rich goof Henry Fonda and snares him, only to find that her sweet simpiness awakens tender feelings in her. Then he finds out who she really--make that "really"-- is and wants nothing more to do with her. She adopts a British accent and a new name and goes after him again, and he, with the flawless logic of someone who wants to believe, no matter what, reasons that she can't be the same girl he met and rejected, because she would have tried harder to disguise herself. (Stanwyck, in turn, reasons that they really do look different to each other now, because they're no longer in love at that specific place and time.) She wants to prove that she can get him to the altar, because she needs to get even with him for humiliating and spurning her and breaking her heart. But she also wants to do it because she still wants him. ("I need him," she purrs, "like the ax needs the turkey.") The moral of the story is that you can have your cake and eat it to, so long as you don't mind there being a few shards of glass in the icing. I don' tknow about you, but there have been days when I wouldn't have minded at all.



With all due respect to the makers of Kill Bill and Oldboy, my favorite recent (i.e., not-classic-yet) revenge movie might be The Damned United, an English film from last year that was directed by Tom Hooper and adapted by Peter Morgan from a novel by David Peace, a fictional speculation on what might have been going on in the mind of the late "football"--you know, soccer--manager Brian Clough (played by Michael Sheen), during the few weeks in 1974 when he was in charge of Leeds United, the high point of his career in terms of his profile and the low point in every other way. The movie's Clough is a strutting, headstrong working class bloke with a smile on his face and a chip on his shoulder; he has a flair for delivering such sound bites as, "I wouldn't say I'm the best manager in the country, but I am in the top one." The movie's point of view is that Clough was driven to win, as the manager of the Derby club, by a ferocious rivalry taking place in his head between himself and Don Revie (Colm Meaney), who was his predecessor as manager of Leeds, who he thinks slighted him by not saying hello and shaking his hand when their teams met each other on the field of battle. Once Revie has been rude to him, it's not much of a leap for him to observe, or conclude, that Revie is a scurrilous cold-hearted bastard who has tutored his men in the dark arts of dirty play, unsportsmanlike conduct, and outright cheating. When he's brought in as Revie's replacement, he sees it as his opportunity to show that his way is right and Revie's way was wrong, wrong, wrong--an attitude that he makes the mistake of immediately sharing with the players and the media.



He promptly flames out, a victim of his own declaration of total war against an enemy who may or may not be fully cognizant of his existence, but there's a happy ending, and not just because a series of titles at the end informs the ignorant among us that Clough went on to success with a different team, winning two European cups in succession, while Don Revie was a dismal failure for the rest of his career, so that his name is now used by English schoolchildren to taunt the less genetically and intellectually gifted among them and is a common euphemism for "bedpan." But the real triumph is, of course, he's the one who got the movie made about him. In your face, Revie!